The four thousand universes of Paul Klee

Well, maybe there were more. Who knows, if you count both the paintings and the drawings.

I do admire the way Klee operated. He would lay out six or seven blank canvases, work on the first one until he had nothing left to say, go on to the second canvas, do the same thing, and so on, until he returned to the first canvas—at which point he had a whole different set of ideas—so he would add to the first canvas. Around and around he would go, until he was satisfied with all six universes, at which point he would give titles to the paintings…and those titles might have nothing to do with them.

He was both disciplined and free, serious and fanciful. Acute and loose. Realistic and fantastical. He enjoyed himself.

I like his fish, swimming across the canvas, occasionally looking to the side at the viewer. He could be a cartoonist when he wanted to be. He could paint nothing more than a sketch. He could make a canvas dense with color. He could be cold or warm. He could be a caricaturist, a satirist, a romantic.

Klee: “Everything vanishes around me, and works are born as if out of the void. Ripe, graphic fruits fall off.”

To some, Klee was a child. But he wasn’t. He was a mature man looking at the works of children and building them up, on his canvases, into something elegant tinged with happiness.

He satisfied himself. This is unusual. Whatever he was reaching for, he found a way to paint that affirmed his own pleasure. At the same time, he avoided cloying self-indulgence. This, too, is unusual.

In his heart and soul, he was a rebel. But he didn’t take his rebellion to a point of destruction. He was always finding another way to express worlds he preferred to this one.

This is, perhaps, why very few people care about him anymore. He was free in a way that is mysterious to minds now.

It does no good to look briefly at his paintings. At a museum, you need to stop and give each painting a few minutes—and after a while you begin to see what he was doing—although you can’t give it a name. You may not like most of his work, but some paintings will stay with you, as if they were already sitting there in your imagination and he knew that and gave you back a piece of your own subconscious reverie.

“Remember this?” he says. And you do.

You stop, transfixed. You say to yourself, “I thought about this once.”

This is was how I educated myself about painting and sculpture. I looked at Egyptian statues and florid French romantic paintings; I looked at Cezanne and Van Gogh; I looked at Rodin; I looked at early and late Picasso; I looked at Klee and de Kooning and Pollock; I looked at Goya and van Eyck; I looked at Bonnard and Corot; I looked at the masters and would-be masters of every period of Western art.

Every day I had different favorites. Claims of one painter or another defacing and corrupting the meaning of beauty meant nothing to me; I was interested in the work. I didn’t care about Picasso’s distortion of a female face. I didn’t care about de Kooning’s massive disruptions of traditional space. I wasn’t coming from a particular school, and since I was grasping the whole sweep of painting across centuries, I wasn’t bothered by what was happening to art in the 20th century. Picasso was never going to unseat and replace Piero della Francesca. Matisse was never going to blot out Vermeer. Pollock was never going to erase the memory of Renoir. They—past and present—were all there, in the museums, and there they would stay.

To me, this was a minor miracle. The museums were alive.

There was something else. All the paintings in all the rooms spoke of art that had not yet been done. There were glimpses and hints. The paintings said: “There is a future but we don’t know what it is.”

If you want to know about creative impulse and creative force, go to museums. Go early and often. Go alone. Wander from room to room and LOOK at what is hanging on the walls. Gradually, you’ll give up some of your hidebound rules and prejudices. You’ll immerse yourself. You’ll find glorious details in paintings you don’t like. You’ll see the play of hundreds of imaginations at work. Committed imaginations belonging to people who, against all odds, invented worlds upon worlds.

What is it about color, about line, about space? You’ll find out.

We live in a physical world of space, energy, and time. Painters make their own worlds that embody these aspects.

There are untold numbers of books and articles about the Coming Age, in which we glimpse some secret embedded in consciousness, which, if teased out, could change our destiny.

This secret may refer a new energy, or to guidance from unusual beings, or to the “unfolding” of a plan, or to a journey we are on which we must know more about—the variations are endless.

No matter what shape this secret takes, it needs to be discovered. It’s there, we just haven’t found it yet in its fullness.

We must keep looking, researching, introspecting, digging.

SOMETHING crucial is there, like an inner diamond buried in outer mud.

There is another principle, which has been given short shrift in history, which is often ignored or cast to the side, because it focuses on the “I” rather than the “We.”

This other principle does not presuppose a grand plan or a map. It doesn’t demand referring to ancient wisdom or the felicitous arrival of a new state of mind.

It doesn’t ask us to attach ourselves to a larger picture that is already there.

It isn’t a gift that arrives on our doorstep.

It doesn’t require a person to be in a certain state of consciousness before taking action.

For these reasons, people generally prefer to avoid this principle.

It is the Creative Principle.

It states: YOU INVENT REALITY. YOU CAN INVENT REALITY.

And naturally, that reality is connected to what you profoundly WANT.

What you want is unique to you. It isn’t the outcome of a group decision.

To put it another way, you are an artist of reality.

In this (unlimited) territory, you launch. You create. You don’t need to obtain permission. You don’t need to wait for a sign or signal.

You don’t look for a secret that tells you what to do or how to do it.

If you have guiding ideas, they are your own.

The Creative Principle offloads a great deal of stifling baggage people morbidly associate with ACTION.

Here is an excerpt from an essay I wrote, “Occult Man and His Search for His True Nature”:

Now we come to the threshold of a shift into another dimension of experience. Regardless of how long the journey has taken so far, now Occult Man begins to examine his very role as the searcher. The seeker. The discoverer.

Is the whole paradigm of questioner-question-answer able to yield up the effect of finding his true nature?

At every turn, it seems as if he’s been looking for some sort of content or material or information that will unlock the door.

All along, he has been searching for some kind of reality that is already there. A deeper reality, a more elevated reality. Concealed, out of view. Hidden.

Which is why he is Occult Man. Because of the way he has been proceeding.

But suppose…there is no such hidden reality which is his true nature? Suppose that is the cosmic joke.

And suppose, instead, he is the maker of realities.

Suppose that is his true nature.

Suppose that is the secret.

And, most interesting, suppose every question about existence he has ever had will yield up answers once he becomes a maker of realities.

Suppose every self-deception and cynical conclusion about his life he has ever entertained is a cover for: refusing to see he is a maker of realities.

Suppose, most importantly, inventing realities that are closest to his deepest desires, and making those realities into fact in the world, is what he has truly wanted all along.

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.

That was quite amazing how you’ve managed to put into words the complex thought processes regarding making ones own small mark, or just simply being defeated by the meaningless confusion of the masses.If your writing comes easy for you that is quite a gift. Very tough to focus on only one path. There’s just so much to take in and so little time to sort it all through.

Klee’ was a poet, another mad man daring to fly high on bees wings. Lol.
I love it, I wondered if he had a connection to Salvador Dali type.
Off course it was the period as well — the type was ripe for artists such as these.

His (Klee’) way of seeing the figure more that what you say is in the literal. He dared to dream, and strangely he was one of those who went through the meat grinder of World War 1. Which was hell on earth.

What a waste…he saw friends, artists destroyed. Human life discarded like ued paper. Their potential snuffed out forever, like candles.

Your bit on occulted man made me re-read a poem inspired by that original piece you wrote.